As I continue to wade through the Blue Book and NICAP case files, another UFO catalogue was brought to my attention recently. That is the Dominque F. Weinstein catalogue of UFO sightings made by pilots. Like the NICAP list, it is mostly a listing of sight- ings. Some have times, some do not. Many have dates but, like the “Best evidence”, other dates are so vague, they are worthless. How can sightings that have no specific date or time be worth including in any catalogue? This is another case of padding a list with poor quality cases to make it seem significant. One has to wonder, how many of the cases on the list, that have actual dates and times, can stand up to critical analysis?
IFOs
There seemed to be some effort by the project 1947 group to correct mistakes on the list but it does not appear to be very thor- ough. They identified only two cases that they considered to be IFOs.
1969.01.22 1600Z, Pacific 20 deg 22’ N, 166 deg 12’W - Slick and Saturn Airway.
This observation was a missile firing from Vandenberg AFB, California. VFON Report # 642. 1969.04.29-05.03 Puerto Rico and vicinity.
Pyramid-shaped object seen for several days over Puerto Rico, photographed, detected on radar and observed from National Guard and other aircraft. Inquiry by the Weather Bureau for Dr. James McDonald found no agency that had released such a balloon. Suggestions were that it was a balloon released in the southern hemisphere that left that circulation pattern and moved north. (Or possibly an intel- ligence gathering balloon.)1
Considering all the effort that I, and others, have put forth to help weed out the IFOs, one would think the project 1947 group would follow-up and see if such identifications had merit. It seems they either did not bother to look or felt that they did not agree with any of the explanations. While some of these identifications may not be 100% positive, I do think that they certainly have merit and should not be dismissed with a mere wave of the hand because a skeptic proposed them.
* The time listed in the table is off the re-entry time by two hours. However, the source used by the table is Timothy Good’s book and not a verifiable source of infor- mation. DEFE-24-2055-1-1 indicates the time was 1900 hours, which is the re-entry time (assuming the time is CET).3
While this list is far from complete and some of these are only “possible” explanations, it is apparent that a good number of these cases can be explained. If the purpose of the list was to be a serious collection of reports that cannot be explained, one would think there would be an honest effort to sweep out the IFOs and potential IFOs. Instead, the list is padded with bad reports, which mask any possible signal with a bunch of noise.
Future evaluations
In future issues of SUNlite, I intend on examining a case from the list to see if there is a potential explanation. It is my desire to per- form the task of filtering out the IFOs so people can focus their attention on the remaining cases, which MIGHT contain something of interest.
Quelle: SUNlite 4/2019